Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/277

 REVIEWS 263

A still broader question sometimes insists upon forcing itself in between the lines of such books as we are considering. What is society anyhow? Society is an idea. It is not a concrete material thing at all. It belongs to the same general class of ideas as a genus or a species. A genus is not an organism, neither is a species, nor any other classific group. These are conceptions, ideas. They are true Platonic ideas. This does not detract from their importance. The most important things in the world are ideas virtue, honor, justice, liberty, truth itself. Now society is simply an idea, a relation of things, not a con- crete object. It was with just such questions that the old mediaeval philosophy realism, nominalism, conceptualism, idealism, etc. occupied itself. The essence of metaphysics is to objectify ideas, to make entities out of relations. The method of the advocates of the social organism theory is essentially metaphysical or ontological. It is not scientific. It imputes individual reality to a classific idea. It objectifies, or, as Comte says, personifies a property. The distinguished ethnologist, Major J. W. Powell, from his prolonged studies in savage philosophy finds that the human mind passes through three distinct preliminary states in its transition to the scientific state. These are (i) imputation, (2) personification, and (3) reification. These may be compared to the first two of Comte's " trois e"tats," the first two being phases (not overlooked by Comte) of his theological stage, and the third being exactly commensurate with his metaphysical stage. Our authors are to be classed in this third stage of " reification." They have reified society, which is only an abstract idea.

It may be objected that society is something different from humanity as a whole, from the genus Homo, or, as some prefer, the species Homo sapiens. Grant this, and compare a society with a pack of wolves (homo homini lupus). Is a pack of wolves (held together by a conscious- ness not merely of " kind " but of advantage, the same as men in society) an organism? It is the same whether the object is offensive or defen- sive. Is a flock of sheep on a mountain side, or of wild geese flying in a triangle, an organism? Why is not any troop, or group, or herd, or swarm of gregarious animals an organism as well as a horde, or clan, or tribe, or race of men? Such are some of the questions to which the theory, logically carried out, gives rise.

It has been charged that the biologists are responsible for the prominence which the social organism theory has assumed. Nothing

1 JULIKN PlOGKR, La Vi* Social* % la Moral*, tt le Progris, 1894.